Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. — Mark Twain

Then again, when I read Ian’s comment that John Tory “really spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone about how honest he was, and how that has been lacking in politics for years, ” I thought of the following quote that made me chuckle when I read it for the first time last week in Robert Higgs’ “Against Leviathan”:

People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing and, if need be, murdering those who resist?

And while I’m bandying about quotations, I really, really like this one from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”